Microsoft Office Reference Guide

Mar 26, 2004

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I've gone to the Microsoft Office Live web site on several occasions and finally decided to try a trial membership (you will need your credit card and can cancel before being charged — although it's free during the beta period.

When you go to the Office Live web site you can get the details on pricing for three different levels: Basic (free) and Collaboration and Essentials (both $29.95/mo after the beta period).

In reviewing the Product Fact Sheet comparing the versions, I thought I would try Essentials. What differentiated it from the others was the ability to use various business applications online.

I suppose the main advantage of Essentials is that it offers the element of interoperability that I found — it integrates with FrontPage for site management so that you could use your existing FrontPage web site and URL with Essentials for an online business site.

Beyond that, as we'll see, Live reminded me of many of the problems I wrote about in Twelve Things I Hate About MS Office.

The promise of Office Live is that your data is always accessible online and available for collaboration both within your enterprise and by creating accounts for users (clients and customers).

When you sign up using your MS Passport you are confronted with a home page that ressembles SharePoint only it's more generic.

Figure1061

The thing to ask yourself is how useful is a web browser compared to a real application? And what if my connection is down? That's because like SharePoint, everything is built and accessed online through your web browser.

You'll do everything from this Member Center.

For example, if you click Customer Manager — one of the applications in the Essentials package, you get a contact manager online that resembles Outlook in some ways.

What's nice is comes with some sample data to see how it works intuitively and it's easy to delete the data when you're ready for your own.

Figure1062

And if you click the Contacts tab you get a nice application that lets you add and filter and work with contact.

Figure1063

You can also import your contacts from Outlook.

Figure1064

But here's where it gets a bit confusing. If you go back to the Member Center (which you need to do all the time before you get oriented) and click Contacts under Email, you need to sign back into Passport, because your "other" contact list is in your Hotmail account.

Figure1065

(By the way, you can also import your Outlook contacts into the Hotmail contacts list.) But when do you do this? That's key because there does not seem to be a way to synchronize the contacts, only import them, so if you're using Outlook to connect to contacts through email, you will now need to figure out how to do it using Hotmail.

Figure1066

Through the Hotmail connection you have one online calendar...

Figure1067

And what's really confusing is that Essentials has its own Calendar application as well.

Figure1068

Having an online calendar you can share is kind of cool, but there doesn't seem to be any way of importing or synching your Outlook calendar.

And there's the rub. If you are starting a business from scratch and want to begin from the outset running it online, Office Live may be viable.

For one thing, part of the process is the ability to register a new (or transfer an old) URL.

But what if you already have a business running using the "real" Microsoft Office? You need to develop a strategy for integrating your Outlook content right off the bat.

So if you use the Essentials applications, there are some nice features, like a Dashboard similar to Outlook Today that has all of your Calendar, Customer and Porject information together in a single web page.

Figure1069

Project is one of the Essentials applications that you can use to plan various tasks and include others in the process, assign elements and milestones and enforce accountability.

Figure1070

But if you can find anywhere in the interface where I can import or export my project data to Excel, Project or Visio, you're better than I am.

And that's what really annoys me. Is there a memo pad or word processor like Word or Writely? No.

The irony isn't lost on me that it was Oracle's Ellison who has been predicting online apps for years, and this is Microsoft's entry into the fray. But still I wonder, just where is my stuff? And what if the network is down?

I'd feel a lot better if I could at least download an XML file of the various apps to keep locally and perhaps import into Office 2007(?).

And that brings me back to my main point from Twelve Things I Hate About MS Office — who you gonna call? I seem to remember when I signed up for Live that somewhere there was supposed to be "live," or at least responsive, tech support.

I sent an email to the Help area of my Live web installation and it went into the typical black hole. My questions were about how to work with my other Office applications; for example, what if I had a project built in Excel. Can I somehow import it into the Office Live Project Manager?

Oh wait minute — I forgot — my email went to Hotmail. Maybe they did respond...

And yes they did. Here is the gist of the response:

Okay — uh — when? My guess is with Office 2007 and its XML based file formats.

But the Hotmail element is very confusing, with its multiple calendars and contacts in addition to the Live versions.

But wait a minute, the Essentials package now offers the possibility of using an Outlook Connector so that you can synch your Outlook contacts and email with the Essentials Office Live web site. It even says it works when you're offline — somehow I doubt that. But at least there is some hope. If you're using Basic or Collaboration, you're still out of luck though.

So here's the bottom line. If you need a free web site, and don't have one yet, try the Basic package with the caveat that you will be using Hotmail for your email and probably your calendar from then on. This will give you a quick and dirty web presence with some functionality.

As for the Essentials applications, if you're starting from scratch give them a shot. If you're an experience Office user, don't expect to be able to leverage your current content into the online applications for the foreseeable future.

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